Phil Ivey Gets Bracelet Number Nine at WSOP APAC

Thursday, April 11th, 2013 by Ryan

The name Phil Ivey has long been associated with winning in the poker world. Regardless of if we are talking about online poker or live poker, Ivey simply wins. He’s a massive online player, but you can also find him at some of the biggest and most popular poker tournaments throughout the world as well. This was exactly the case as we saw Ivey at the third event of the World Series of Poker Asia Pacific tournament. While the WSOP APAC didn’t draw in the largest number of players that we’ve seen, and this event actually had a fairly small field, there were still a ton of big named players who showed up to play. This included Ivey, as well as Daniel Negreanu, Barry Greenstein, Phil Hellmuth, Joseph Cheong, Joe Hachem, Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, Jonathan Duhamel, and quite a few other players. So while the field only had 81 players, it was loaded with some seriously strong players, and whoever took down this gold bracelet was definitely going to have to work for it.

We recently wrote about the final table of this event that featured Ivey holding the chip lead from the get go of the action, and Negreanu sitting in second place behind him. This was looking like it was set to be a heck of a final table. At the final table of this event on Wednesday though, we saw why many people feel that Phil Ivey is really the strongest all-around poker player in the world, as he was able to take down his ninth gold bracelet, which is something that very, very few players have been able to do in their careers. The gold bracelet was his 8th in the last 12 years, and it was in the $2,200 Mixed Game tournament. While Ivey is fourth on the all-time bracelet list, we all pretty much expect him to be competing for quite a few more fairly soon. He sits behind the current leader in Phil Hellmuth at 13, Doyle Brunson at 10, and Johnny Chan at 10.

Ivey has more than $17 million in career tournament earnings, and this is just on the live poker tournament circuit. He has the nine bracelets, a World Poker Tour title, ten different top 10 finishes at World Poker Tour events, and let’s not forget about the $20 million that he’s made from playing online poker as well. That’s a whole lot of cash, and while this bracelet wasn’t going to give out a pay day that was nearly as large as the past ones, he still had to be incredibly happy to get the gold bracelet.

The final table began with six players, and we saw two players get knocked out fairly quickly, but then went Negreanu down in fourth place. From this point on, Ivey decided to up his overall aggression and look to push some other players out. Ivey was actually the short stack at one point during the three handed play, but he got a whole lot of chips back after eliminating Graeme Putt a bit after building the stack back up. This left him against Brandon Wong for the title, and Wong had the chip lead.

Wong simply couldn’t hold off one of the best in the business though, as Ivey just kept grinding it out and winning pots, before he was able to win the final hand on a 2-7 Triple Draw hand. While this is a huge bracelet for Ivey, he still gets a solid pay day of $51,840. For second place, Wong is going home with $32,039. The talks of Negreanu potentially getting his fifth bracelet were pretty popular as well, but he fell short and he’s gone a full five years without bringing home a bracelet to this point.

Watching Phil Ivey play is always a lot of fun, and we expect to see him deep in some tournaments in the near future as well, especially with the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas starting up soon as well. The same could be said about Negreanu and many other players in this event as well, so we’ll be sure to keep you updated on how the rest of their years go.